Wyclef Jean’s presidential bid

Wyclef Jean’s presidential bid

12 August 2010 Comments: 0

By Pooja Bha­tia, The Nation
The rap­per Wyclef Jean had long claimed he had no inter­est in becom­ing the pres­i­dent of Haiti. How­ever, the recent announce­ment of his inten­tion to seek office has wor­ry­ing impli­ca­tions for the very foun­da­tions of the belea­guered nation’s polit­i­cal life.
When I vis­ited Gonaïves in Sep­tem­ber 2008, I thought I had seen the worst that could hap­pen in Haiti. Three trop­i­cal storms in as many weeks had rerouted rivers, forged new ones, turned almost 100,000 res­i­dents out of ruined homes, and washed peo­ple, cars, and live­stock out of their yards. Gonaïves was a dump to begin with; now it was a city under water, a proto-Atlantis. Two weeks later murky water still reached some rooftops. Chil­dren waded in it, chest-high, women washed clothes in it, and every­one car­ried their pos­ses­sions on their heads. It was too much to take in.
But Haiti has a habit of demol­ish­ing your cer­tainty, your belief in the nat­ural order of things, the sense that you might pre­dict how life will turn out. Now, of course, the dis­as­ter in Gonaïves looks tame. At least 200,000 peo­ple died in the Jan­u­ary 12 earth­quake, half the pop­u­la­tion of Port-au-Prince still lives in tents, and there is no plan for get­ting them out. Seven months later, an untold num­ber of bod­ies rot under the rubble.
And that’s not all: the Haitian-born hip-hop star Wyclef Jean could be the nation’s next president.
I had gone to Gonaïves as part of a UN jun­ket with him and the Amer­i­can actor Matt Damon. As they descended from their heli­copter, South Amer­i­can peace­keep­ers swarmed around Damon, demand­ing auto­graphs and pho­tographs, and mostly ignored Jean. This bal­ance shifted when our con­voy reached a pub­lic plaza. Jean and Damon mounted the stage in front of thou­sands of newly dis­pos­sessed, muddy-legged cit­i­zens, who were befud­dled by Damon and cheered for Jean.
He spoke of sol­i­dar­ity and faith. He told the crowd he loved them and swore never to aban­don them. He apol­o­gised for his poor com­mand of the lan­guage, which he called the most beau­ti­ful in the world: “My Kreyol’s not good, my Kreyol’s heavy, I know,” but said he loved speak­ing it. And later, as he pre­pared to leave the stage and resume his city tour, he said: “And for every­one who can hear this, lis­ten, I want to tell you some­thing: Wyclef Jean does not want to be the pres­i­dent of Haiti. Wyclef Jean will never be pres­i­dent of Haiti. No, Wyclef Jean is an advo­cate for Haiti!”
The crowd roared. Teenagers hoisted him on their shoul­ders and walked him through the mud to the mil­i­tary vehi­cle that waited for him. Jean seemed beloved, and justly so.
How­ever, on Thurs­day August 5 Jean sub­mit­ted papers to run for the pres­i­dency. It is not because of this ear­lier dis­avowal of inter­est that Jean’s can­di­dacy is sur­pris­ing to me. I know bet­ter; besides the rumours had been whis­pered for months, even years. Some time in July, a well-connected Hait­ian offi­cial told me that Jean would run for office – straight-up, with no equiv­o­ca­tion. I dis­missed the very notion.
Jean, after all, was far­ci­cally unqual­i­fied. He couldn’t speak one of Haiti’s offi­cial lan­guages, French, and, as I had seen, bum­bled through the other. Some­times, it seemed, he could barely speak Eng­lish. Friends who had worked with Jean’s NGO, Yele Haiti, had grum­bled about its slop­pi­ness and super­fi­cial­ity for years before the quake; after­wards, Yele Haiti came under fire for fil­ing its tax forms years late and mak­ing shady pay­ments to Jean and his cousin. The New York press con­fer­ence he called to defend him­self showed a much dif­fer­ent man than the one I’d seen in Gonaïves, one that almost bragged about car­ry­ing dead girls from the rub­ble. In an inter­view in the Miami Her­ald last week, Jean par­ried a reporter’s ques­tion about finan­cial mis­man­age­ment by point­ing out that hav­ing an Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice lien for $2.1 mil­lion (Dh7.71m) issued against him “should show you… how much Clef really makes a year”.
Per­haps most impor­tantly, or per­haps not, this being Haiti, the nation’s con­sti­tu­tion expressly requires pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates to have lived in Haiti for the five years before elec­tion day, Novem­ber 28. Jean has not. Usu­ally, Hait­ian offi­cials at least wait until they are in office to start vio­lat­ing the constitution.
Haiti’s next pres­i­dent will have one of the most dif­fi­cult jobs on the planet: find­ing ways to resolve centuries-old land-rights tan­gles, shel­ter­ing 1.5m peo­ple, build­ing insti­tu­tions, and cajol­ing recal­ci­trant for­eign donors, who have dis­bursed only 10 per cent of the money ini­tially pledged for the rebuild­ing of Haiti.
Even in the best of times, the pres­i­dency is not for the squea­mish or the scrupu­lous. In 205 years, the nation has seen only two peace­ful, demo­c­ra­tic tran­si­tions of power. The rest have been achieved via coups d’état, assas­si­na­tions, pro­vi­sional gov­ern­ments, self-appointments, and dic­ta­tor­ships – these are the his­tor­i­cal motifs of the Hait­ian pres­i­dency. The job demands the build­ing of unholy alliances, whether with ide­o­log­i­cally opposed par­ties, the exploita­tive mer­chant class, drug traf­fick­ers, impov­er­ished slum gangs, or com­bi­na­tions thereof sim­ply to remain in power. It’s not dif­fi­cult to envi­sion Pres­i­dent Wyclef turn­ing into another in a long line of Hait­ian dem­a­gogues (although one that, unlike Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide, lacks the gift of gab) or, as many pre­dict, a pawn of the US State Depart­ment or the country’s elite classes.
How­ever, even con­sid­er­ing such pos­si­bil­i­ties is to get way ahead of our­selves. The Con­seil Elec­toral Pro­vi­soire (CEP), the pres­i­den­tially sanc­tioned body that deter­mines can­di­dates’ fit­ness to run, has not ruled on Jean’s or any other can­di­dates’ eli­gi­bil­ity. That will hap­pen on August 17. Expect uproar either way.
Although Jean has hijacked dis­course sur­round­ing the elec­tions, the fact is that this elec­toral sea­son was bizarre and com­plex before he entered the fray. First, the frag­mented oppo­si­tion claimed it would boy­cott the elec­tions unless the allegedly cor­rupt CEP was replaced, then a num­ber of key fig­ures broke off and began to announce their own can­di­da­cies. Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas, was barred from the elec­tions for sub­mit­ting improper doc­u­ments. (Aris­tide has been liv­ing in South Africa almost since he was ousted in 2004, and didn’t have the doc­u­ments per­tain­ing to the lead­er­ship of the party cor­rectly notarised by offi­cials.) Pres­i­dent René Pré­val, who spent much of last year lur­ing leg­is­la­tors to a new party that many con­sid­ered poised to win the elec­tions, des­ig­nated his for­mer Prime Min­is­ter, Jacques Edouard Alexis, as its pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Then three days later, he with­drew his sup­port, after real­is­ing that the sen­a­tors who ousted Alexis in 2008 still didn’t sup­port him.
The big fear of those in Haiti’s classe poli­tique, which in two decades has played a star­ring role in the degra­da­tion of its citizenry’s faith in democ­racy, is that Jean could win. He has money, celebrity, and most of all, legit­i­macy with the nation’s youth: some 65 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion of Haiti is under the age of 30. (“He speaks rap,” the gov­ern­ment advi­sor and now-presidential can­di­date Leslie Voltaire told me.) Before Jean entered the race, turnout was expected to be low – per­haps as low as the 10 per cent who showed up for the April 2009 sen­a­to­r­ial elec­tions. Dis­af­fec­tion is wide­spread. In two cen­turies of inde­pen­dence, the only con­stant has been the cor­rup­tion of the country’s lead­ers. Since the earth­quake, some Haitians even believe that what the coun­try really needs is for a blan (for­eigner) to take charge.
In Jean’s ver­sion of events, he was “drafted” to run by Haiti’s youth. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but the scene I saw last Thurs­day, when Jean filed his pres­i­den­tial papers, sug­gested any­thing but spon­tane­ity. A thou­sand or two young guys showed up in white T-shirts embla­zoned with the name of his move­ment, Fas a Fas, a phrase that had been spray-painted all over town the week­end before. Rap blared from at least three carnival-esque floats. I asked two teenagers why they, unlike oth­ers, weren’t danc­ing or singing. “We’re drunk,” one of them said, glassy-eyed. He then showed me a half-drunk bot­tle of cane alco­hol. “They’re giv­ing these out to every­one.” Jean body­surfed on the crowd for a while, then gave a speech in which he com­pared him­self to Barack Obama and shouted “Fas a Fas” a few times.
Weav­ing my way through the rev­ellers on the way back to my car, I spot­ted a pair of older Haitians walk­ing down the street, arm in arm. They were once neigh­bours, but the earth­quake had destroyed both of their houses and now they lived in sep­a­rate camps. A few blocks up, they had run into each other and now were walk­ing toward the hub­bub. I asked them whether they planned to vote for Jean.
The woman, Sylvia, made a face like she’d bit­ten into a bad apple. “Why would I vote for any­one?” she said. “When they come to my tent, and see how the rain floods it every night, and tell me what they’re going to do for me – then, maybe, I’d vote for someone.”
The man, Enel, added: “And this per­son, Wyclef, we don’t know who he is. It’s been six months since the katas­trof, and nobody has told us what the plan is. If he has a plan, well then, let’s see it.”
We chat­ted a bit longer, until Sylvia looked towards the approach­ing throngs in the street. Jean rode atop their shoul­ders, wav­ing. “Men prezi­dan là,” Sylvia said, wryly. There goes the president.
I like to believe that Jean will not be allowed to run for the pres­i­dency: it would be uncon­sti­tu­tional; case closed. Then I remind myself of Haiti’s capac­ity to upend legal and moral logic. For­get­ting it con­sti­tutes the kind of self-delusion that had lulled every­one into believ­ing they were safe from the earthquake.
Sure, we’d heard that Port-au-Prince sat along a fault line that had been dor­mant for too long, but back then, it was impos­si­ble to think that things could get any worse.
Pooja Bha­tia is a writer based in Port-au-Prince and a fel­low at the Insti­tute of Cur­rent World Affairs.